Many software developers collaborate to design and develop distributed applications that have a back-end and front-end or client/server architecture and operate based on messages exchanged over communication networks. Testing and debugging, for example, often involve sending network messages, such as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) requests, and receiving responses, including HTTP responses, which can be analyzed to determine whether the distributed application is operating as expected or to identify and address application faults or errors.
In order to test and debug distributed applications, or otherwise investigate distributed application behavior, collaborating software developers often exchange network messages that the distributed application is generating or processing. Capturing and exchanging the network messages is generally a manual task that requires significant resources, thereby reducing the resources available for other software development tasks. Additionally, many current manual methods of exchanging network messages are susceptible to human error.
Current network message exchange methods also do not present the exchanged messages in an effective manner for use or analysis by a recipient. In particular, network messages are less useful when received in a format that is not human-readable or cannot be queried. Moreover, many methods of capturing network messages do not allow manipulation of the messages that would facilitate more effective analysis and investigation of the distributed application behavior for debugging or testing purposes. For example, developers often generate and send screenshots or other images of HTTP request or response content, which do not facilitate manipulation of the content represented therein.